Joshua C. Prever

Joshua Prever is a litigation and regulatory attorney in Holland & Knight's Fort Lauderdale office. He is creative and solutions oriented, and his financial services clients rely on him to solve complicated problems.

Having more than 15 years of experience in the consumer lending and residential mortgage space, Mr. Prever serves as trusted counsel for large and small financial institutions, along with emerging financial technology (FinTech) companies that are overseen by a mixture of federal and state regulators. A litigator first and foremost, Mr. Prever leverages a nationwide team to defend his financial services clients in class actions, mass actions and single plaintiff cases throughout the country. In his role as trusted counsel, he not only defends his clients in court, he also guides them through federal and state regulatory inquiries. Having worked as both outside and in-house counsel, Mr. Prever's advice is grounded on real-world operational issues, needs and business goals these institutions must address when adapting to new legal requirements.

Mr. Prever has significant experience in the cutting-edge digital mortgage, eNote and eVault space – advising mortgage origination, servicing and default servicing clients on all aspects of working with fully digital loans. He is nationally recognized for his notary law knowledge and focuses on the quickly changing and expanding remote online notarization (RON) space, which is often necessary to achieve fully digital loans. With the vast majority of states now embracing RON, Mr. Prever works with FinTech and financial services companies as they look to integrate RON services to their existing processes. When doing so, he ensures that his clients comply with the patchwork of state laws and regulations governing RON usage as well as their interplay with the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA), Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (E-Sign Act), New York's State Electronic Signatures and Records Act (ESRA), Illinois' Electronic Commerce Security Act and other state laws created to allow for electronic and digital signatures.

In addition to defending class actions and other litigation matters, a significant part of Mr. Prever's practice is focused on preventing and, where necessary, resolving concerns raised by federal and state regulators. His experience includes successfully counseling three large financial institutions as they worked with federal regulators to lift broad ranging consent orders. Through his work with financial institutions across the country, he has acquired extensive knowledge of default servicing and regulatory compliance issues concerning loan servicing in all 50 states, Service Members Civil Relief Act (SCRA) protections, managing third-party vendors, creating and revising internal policies and procedures, and implementing regulatory directives from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Office of the Comptroller of Currency (OCC), Federal Reserve Banks (FRB) and a host of state regulators. He also routinely provides guidance and support to financial institutions in responding to attorney general requests, mortgage and loan servicing audits conducted by investors and outsourcing of default services to servicers and sub-servicers.

Outside of his legal practice, Mr. Prever lectures and writes on a variety of topics concerning the mortgage industry and, in particular, RON innovations, the CFPB's ever-changing role in the mortgage and financial services industry, as well as the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA), Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA), Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and Truth in Lending Act (TILA).

As part of an active pro bono practice, Mr. Prever successfully represented victims of political persecution who sought asylum in the United States after being forced to flee their country. He organized workshops enlisting dozens of lawyers to assist Holocaust survivors in obtaining restitution benefits through the German Government Ghetto Fund. In addition, he routinely serves as attorney and guardian ad litem for children in need.